Suchergebnisse

AbstractRecent cross‐national comparative studies have found no effect of countries' macroeconomic performances on trust in national political institutions, once political explanations (most notably corruption) are taken into account. Although political trust is not determined by the comparison of national economic performance to other countries, it is argued in this article that it is affected by comparisons to their own past performance. In a multilevel, fixed effects analysis of Eurobarometer data (21 waves in 15 European Union Member States between 1999 and 2011) the extent to which within‐country variations in economic performance affect political trust longitudinally is tested. Three major conclusions are reached. First, within‐country, longitudinal changes in performance (growth, deficits, unemployment and inflation) affect political trust. Second, the impact of macroeconomic performance is stronger among the lower educated. Third, even in times of economic duress, budgetary deficits tend to undermine political trust.

Like many party systems across Western Europe, the Dutch party system has been in flux since 2002 as a result of a series of related developments, including the decline of mainstream parties which coincided with the emergence of radical right-wing populist parties and the concurrent dimensional transformation of the political space. This article analyses how these challenges to mainstream parties fundamentally affected the structure of party competition. On the basis of content analysis of party programmes, we examine the changing configuration of the Dutch party space since 2002 and investigate the impact of these changes on coalition-formation patterns. We conclude that the Dutch party system has become increasingly unstable. It has gradually lost its core through electoral fragmentation and mainstream parties' positional shifts. The disappearance of a core party that dominates the coalition-formation process initially transformed the direction of party competition from centripetal to centrifugal. However, since 2012 a theoretically novel configuration has emerged in which no party or coherent group of parties dominates competition.